The "dimensions of genericity" table from "Web Architecture: Generic Resources" by Tim Berners-Lee in 1996, annotated to display the RFCs that implemented these dimensions for the Web. |
Wikis hold every revision of a given page. |
Why do Memento and MediaWiki belong together? With a browser extension like Memento for Chrome, or Memento for Firefox, users can pick a date in the past and seamlessly browse the Web as if it were that date. If Memento were supported by wikis, Memento would carry a user from a web archive observation to a wiki revision and back out to another site, all the while keeping them near their desired date. Who would need this functionality? In the next sections, I provide two scenarios where this would be useful. I then conclude with a section containing resources with more information about the Memento MediaWiki Extension.
Example Usage Scenarios
The Historian
The unfolding events of the search for suspects from the Boston Marathon Bombing, as told by mementos for a single Bostinno article in Archive-It's 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing collection. |
Hanah is researching the Boston Marathon Bombing. The screenshots above show how the mementos for a single news article change as an event unfolds. To provide context to the earliest version of this article, Hannah wants to know what Wikipedia published about the event around 5 PM on April 19, 2013. Without Memento installed on Wikipedia, she would have to tediously scroll through pages of article history as shown in the animation below just to find the correct revision.
Anyone trying to find a specific revision in MediaWiki must scroll through pages of article history. |
The Fan
I am a fan of many different fictional universes. Usually, because I am a PhD student, I cannot watch my favorite television shows on the night that they air. This does not mean that my fandom waits until I have caught up. The Fandom (formerly Wikia) web site runs MediaWiki. As a Star Trek fan, I watch Star Trek: Discovery. The screenshot below contains a spoiler about one of the characters. The episode "Project Daedalus" aired on March 14, 2019. If had not seen the episode, I would immediately see a spoiler when visiting the current version of the page below.
The current version of this Fandom page contains a spoiler about this Star Trek character. |
The version of the page before the episode air date does not contain the spoiler. |
If I were using Memento, I could set the date in my browser and follow links to this page, as shown below. However, I still see a spoiler? Why?
Even though I use Memento for Chrome and set my date prior to the date of the episode, I still get the spoiler? |
In "Avoiding spoilers: wiki time travel with Sheldon Cooper," Michael Nelson, Herbert Van de Sompel, and I explain in more detail why this happens. Web archives only have access to some observations of a wiki page, and hence the nearest memento to the user's desired datetime is often correct. Because the wiki has access to all revisions, installing the Memento MediaWiki Extension directly on the wiki allows us to see the exact revision present at the desired datetime, thus avoiding this problem.
More Information About The Memento MediaWiki Extension
These are just two scenarios where users could benefit from wikis containing the Memento MediaWiki Extension. Can you think of others? Are there times when you wish you could have browsed the Wikipedia of the past? The following resources provide more information.
- The extension's administrator page on mediawiki.org
- The extension's user page on mediawiki.org
- Source code page on GitHub
- Source code page on Wikimedia's Gerrit
- Memento Capabilities for Wikipedia from mementoweb.org
-- Shawn M. Jones
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